| Quantifying Collaboration on Computationally-Enhanced Tables (2008) | |||||||||||||||
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| Recent research in our group has focused on tabletop interface design, with an emphasis on identifying design guidelines that facilitate group work. We have developed several collaborative tabletop applications, and have evaluated them through formal usability studies and informal walkthroughs. However, while we have had success in evaluating the usability of specific aspects of the tabletop interfaces (aspects of what Pinelle et al. [5] refer to as “taskwork”), the impact of the interface on the “teamwork ” dynamics is far more difficult to judge. We hope that this workshop will provide a stepping-stone for developing a standard for quantitatively and qualititatively describing the impact of groupware technology on collaboration. Experiences and Challenges We have designed and evaluated several four-user tabletop applications for DiamondTouch tables [1]. For example, we have developed collaborative software for selecting music for movie soundtracks that combines the shared tabletop with individual audio information for each group member [4]. More recently, we have been developing an application in cooperation with biologists that allows them to assign metadata to photographs they take in the field, and then to collaboratively perform queries over this set of photos. Based on our experiences designing and evaluating these collaborative tabletop applications, we have identified several potential methods of measuring the degree of and quality of collaboration within the | |||||||||||||||
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